What's New in NI Switch Executive

Overview

NI Switch Executive is an intelligent switch management and routing application that accelerates development and simplifies management of switch systems. The latest release of this software includes new features that help accelerate switch system development and facilitate system scalability for automated test.

Table of Contents

1. Save for Previous Version

The new "Save for Previous Version" functionality allows NI Switch Executive developers to create their switching systems on the latest version of NI Switch Executive, and export to previous versions of the software. This will ease deployment issues when going from one machine to the next and speed up deployment.

Figure 1. Save for Previous

Additionally, this functionality can be implemented using the NI Switch Executive API as seen below.

Figure 2. Saving configuration information in previous version of NISE in LabVIEW

2. Portable Configuration

Previously, users would be required to export all NI Switch Executive configuration files, IVI configuration information, and DAQmx device information. With the new "Portable Configuration API" users are able to make whole system deployments occur much faster by exporting a single file.

Now when exporting data from Measurement and Automation Explorer (MAX), users can export an .nce file containing all of this information. This saves valuable time for massive deployment operations. This operation can be done from withing NI Switch Executive Export Feature or directly from MAX

3. Application Example

Now consider using the new features of NI Switch Executive to simplify switch programming and reduce deployment time. Imagine you have a small test system that uses an NI PXI-4071 7½-digit PXI digital multimeter (DMM) to perform 4-wire resistance measurements on 50 resistors. Connecting the DMM to each resistor one at a time would be tedious and time consuming. Using the Graphical Configuration Utility in NI Switch Executive and an NI PXI-2535 544-crosspoint FET switch module, you can automate this process and have your system running quickly.

If you need to scale your system to measure more than 100 resistors, manually clicking on all the routes in the Graphical Configuration Utility could be time-consuming. In such a case, you can build the framework for your system using the Graphical Configuration Utility and then transfer that framework to Microsoft Excel using the new Excel Import/Export feature in NI Switch Executive. With the text editing features of Microsoft Excel, you can convert your small prototype system into a large automated test system.

Figure 4. Step-by-Step Configuration Process for Large Systems

To watch a demo of the application described above, follow the link below. For more information about these and other major updates, refer to the NI Switch Executive Readme file that is included with the release.